Install GoAWK on Ubuntu 24.04

GoAWK is a command line tool that serves as an alternative to the traditional awk command. Written in the Go programming language, it provides a portable and efficient way to handle text processing tasks like pattern scanning, data extraction, and report generation. This tutorial shows how to install GoAWK on Ubuntu 24.04.

Install GoAWK

Fetch the latest GoAWK release version tag from GitHub and store the version tag in a variable:

GOAWK_VERSION=$(curl -s "https://api.github.com/repos/benhoyt/goawk/releases/latest" | grep -Po '"tag_name": "v\K[0-9.]+')

Next, download tar.gz file from releases page:

wget -qO goawk.tar.gz https://github.com/benhoyt/goawk/releases/latest/download/goawk_v${GOAWK_VERSION}_linux_amd64.tar.gz

Extract executable to /usr/local/bin directory:

sudo tar xf goawk.tar.gz -C /usr/local/bin goawk

We can check GoAWK version as follows:

goawk --version

Remove tar.gz file:

rm -rf goawk.tar.gz

Testing GoAWK

Here's an example of a simple GoAWK command:

goawk -F: '{print $1}' /etc/passwd

The command prints the first field of each line in the /etc/passwd file. The -F: option sets the field delimiter to a colon (:), and {print $1} specifies that the first field of each line should be output.

Uninstall GoAWK

If you decided to completely remove GoAWK, just delete the related file:

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/bin/goawk